Tag Archives: Cape May

Leibowitz tosses the cigarette from the window of his Saab. He is dying and dying is what got him into this mess with Susannah Fontaine-Williams. The coughing fits always take their toll and he sits straight up in the passenger seat and breathes the savory beach air.

He closes his eyes for a quiet, peaceful moment, shading them with the limp brim of his bucket hat. He dozes, lulled by the muffled crashing of the incoming tide and his own blend of medications procured from the cabinets of Leibowitz Pharmacy. The pharmacy, his legacy, going to Ileana on his death. He’d resisted for decades the sale to one chain or another, leaving that payoff for his daughter if she wanted it when the time came.

The constant blare of a care horn pierces his dreamless dozing. Reflexively, he feels for the gun, a Walther PK-9, in his jacket pocket. It’s there.

“Leib?” a soft voice, feminine and familiar. Hands gently push his frail frame back from the steering wheel and upright in his seat. The seat reclines and leans him back, which startles him awake.

“No,” he says. “I can’t breathe in that position.”

“Sorry.” She adjusts the seat so he’s once again upright.

“I’m fine.” He focuses on her. “You should get out of here. They’re coming.”

Susannah’s dog is standing at the car door, leaning in, licking Leibowitz’s face, whimpering. She touches his cheek. When he opens his eyes again, he sees that she is crying. Leibowitz arches a confused eyebrow.

Like this:

The chilly Atlantic laps at Susannah Fontaine-Williams’s feet. The tide is coming in and soon the waves touch her knees then recede past her ankles, before the next one stretches to her thighs. She lay face down, her face turned to a side either asleep or unconscious; she doesn’t know yet.

The next wave ebbs, leaving her untouched, but the one behind it crashes over her back, thrusting her forward then dragging her back toward the sea as it recedes. Water gets in her nose and she sputters and coughs like an old car that hasn’t been turned over for a long time. She starts to rise when another wave knocks her over and tries again to drag her out to sea. This time she pulls herself up to her feet, stretches, checks to make sure her bathing suit contains all of her parts, and walks toward the dry sand of Cape May, New Jersey.

From beyond the dunes a figure watches through binoculars Susannah’s wobbly walk to shore. A couple in sweatshirts walks by and says good morning to her. “You’re staring,” the woman says to her partner.

Why wouldn’t anyone stare? SFW emerges from the sea in a bikini, a dagger strapped to a leg backlit by the rising sun, waves crashing at her feet, reminding you of Ursula Andress in the famous beach scene from Dr. No.

“Sorry,” he says. “She looks so familiar.”

“Mmm, hmm,” she says.

Binoculars dangling from his neck, the watcher speaks into his mobile. “She’s alive. No. It should been strong enough to knock out a horse…Yes…I understand.”

The sun is now fully over the ocean’s undulating horizon. The man with the binoculars gets into his car and lights a cigarette. An instant later he goes into a coughing jag that leaves him wheezing. He pauses then spits out a hunk of viscous black goo onto the sandy parking lot before taking another puff.